


Everything

by indevan



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Depression, M/M, References to Suicide, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-06
Updated: 2013-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-14 02:55:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/831892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indevan/pseuds/indevan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Words cannot be taken back once they are said</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything

**Author's Note:**

> I made a new Warden and so of course my first inclination is to post unnecessary amounts of schmoop.

Zevran first thought that the Warden was an innocent.  He saw his wide-eyed, amazed face when they first came to Denerim.  He walked with his face tilted up, amazed at the buildings, the stone, the smells, everything.  The way he reacted to human food--utensils.  Forks.  The Dalish didn’t use forks, it seemed.  Knives and spoons were all they needed.  Hazel had grabbed it from Alistair’s hand and pressed the tines into his palm.

He certainly looked innocent.  His wide, expressive doe eyes.  Yes, Hazel reminded him of a doe with his big eyes, his soft, downturned mouth, and his velvety lashes.  His short, messy brown hair that fell across his eyes when he wasn’t paying attention.  The lightly colored freckles that colored his sun-browned skin that were visible even under his vallaslin.  His thin, delicate wrists.  The way his hips came in and then swelled out around his comparatively plump rear.  The way he spoke, even--gesturing with his hands as he described monsters that lived beyond Thedas.

Hazel always seemed so innocent, moreso than even Alistair, though Zevran would hesitate to call it naivete as he would with their unlucky bastard friend.  Yet, the first night Zevran went into his tent, the sugary innocent boy was gone and in his place was a beast.  Hazel, it seemed, liked it rough.  The rougher the better.  They would brawl before sex, tussling and punching and pulling hair.  One night, Hazel bit hard on the heel of his hand and looked up, eyes suddenly not like a doe’s but like a hardened predator’s.

“Obliterate me,” he said.

That was just one on the list of commands he gave for Zevran to do to him.  Truthfully, he loved it.  He loved that his Warden was his in submission but still ordered him around.  He loved seeing him bound beneath him, arms above his head and legs spread.  How he would tie him up with elaborate, complicated knots that held him in place and left a beautiful pattern imprinted on his back.

Afterwards, he was back to sugar.  He would curl up against Zevran and stay that way until he fell asleep.  He would talk excitedly about nothing and everything and the doe was back.

Hazel showed him the markings on his face.  Dark and light.  He said it stood for Falon’Din, the friend of the dead.  Forever between two worlds.  Zevran never said that that described Hazel.  Dangerous and soft.  Sweet and hard.  

The world in their tent and the world outside of it.  The world where he was a Grey Warden.  The world that he was saving.  The world where he growled and bit and demanded that Zevran slap his ass or scratch him until he bled.  The world where he was sweet and silly.  Where he threaded his arm through Zevran’s and stared at him with wide, hopeful eyes.  Hazel wanted him to love him and maybe he was starting, too.  That was the worst feeling.  The feeling of falling.  Tasting him on his lips the next day.  His woodsy barley smell on his skin that he would savor until it came time to bathe.  The way his teeth flicked over his lower lip as he spoke.  The way his long, thick lashes shielded those doe eyes.  The curve of his hip where it swelled out into that backside.  The way the muscles in his shoulders bunched as he lifted his battleaxe into the air.  He had felt it before and it did not end well.

So he took refuge in their nights in Hazel’s tents.  The games and ropes and fights.  The way he bleated out as Zevran’s name as he repeatedly pounded into him.  Of yelling and moaning in mixed pleasure and pain.  It was easier, their sex games, than dealing with his confusion.  This love, different than how it was with Rinna.  He didn’t know how he felt.  Love created and destroyed.  Love was a distraction.

One night, Hazel curled around him teasingly as Zevran cleaned them both with a wet cloth.  His arms felt stronger than they had before as they slipped down his shoulders.  The tips of his fingers teased down his chest.  Hazel rested his head on his shoulder and breathed out, the sound a light whistling in Zevran’s ear.

“Ma’arlath,” he said in his sweet, panpipe voice.

Zevran put the cloth down and stroked his fingers down the tendons on that back of Hazel’s hand.

“And what does that mean?”

Hazel turned and pressed a kiss to the part of his neck where Zevran could feel his heartbeat.

“I love you.”

He stilled.

“You...”

Hazel pulled back and his eyes were wide, apprehensive.

“Did I say something wrong?”

Zevran looked at him and Hazel really was a deer.  A deer caught by a hunter and staring down their blade--his blade.  Hazel looked vulnerable and scared.

“Zevran?”

“It was not meant to be about love,” he said finally, voice quiet. “It was supposed to mean nothing.”

Hazel’s face morphed from frightened deer into an angry snarl.

“It meant something to me!”

He had always prided himself on choosing the correct words.  Words for seduction, for luring someone into a false sense of safety.  Yet now he chose his words so clumsily  that he may have lost his Warden.  

“I mean nothing to you?”

“That was not--”

Hazel turned and went to the tent flap and Zevran reached out to put a hand on his shoulder.  His arm flipped up and the back of his hand nearly caught his nose.  Startled, he fell back on the ground in the seated position.

“Don’t touch me!” he yelled. “Don’t touch me ever again!”

Zevran held his hands up to let him know that he was not going to touch him.  Between his bedroom persona and his sweet deer, he had forgotten the temper Hazel could have when he was hurt.

“I should have listened to the others.  I should never have spared you.”

He could hear the tears chasing his words.  He knew Hazel was lying but he didn’t challenge it.  He was the one who hurt him, after all.  When he left his tent, he did not follow.

\--

The first time he saw Hazel was on a piece of paper.  Howe’s rodent eyes scrutinized him as he looked at the two images in front of him: human and elf.  Rough sketches by the Teryn’s recollection of what the two last remaining Wardens in Ferelden looked like.  The sketches were unremarkable.  The human a meaningless, handsome face.  The elf looking too wide-eyed and innocent to be a “danger.”  Zevran was running on adrenaline, then, waiting for his opportunity to die.  For that elf or that human to run him through and end his suffering before the Crows could.

But then there was his face.  Waking up and staring blearily into the two-tone tattoo and an open gaze.  There was gore in his messy hair and somehow it made him look more endearing.

He helped him to his feet and welcomed him to their group as the human made ineffectual squawking noises and folded his arms.

“Hazel,” he said and tipped his head to the side.  Smiled.  His voice was accented and sounded like an instrument.  He would later identify it as panpipes.

“Hmm?”

“My name,” he repeated. “It’s Hazel.”

\--

When he was certain enough time had passed where he was not following him, Zevran left his tent.  He found Alistair crouched near the fire at his usual spot.  He was hunched down and a mound of socks was in front of him.  Two smaller piles were on either side.  He lifted each sock and sniffed it before putting it in one of the piles.  At his arrival, he looked up.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“Your socks smell like cheese,” Zevran replied.

Alistair waved a hand dismissively over his socks.

“Ignore that--what did you do to piss Hazel off like that?  He ran right through here.  Naked, I would add.” Even in the ruddy firelight, he could see Alistair’s blush.

“I...” He stared at Hazel’s tent.  There was no indication of movement inside. “I hurt him.”

Alistair frowned and went back to sorting socks.

“I take it you mean actually hurting him and not that...sex-hurting thing you both do.”

He nodded.

“He said he loved me and I said it meant nothing.”

Alistair whistled and said, “You really said that?”

“Yes...I did not...”

_Mean it._

He didn’t finish the sentence but Alistair nodded as if he got it.

“Don’t tell him that now,” he suggested. “He won’t listen.”

And maybe Alistair wasn’t that naive after all.  He went back to sorting his socks and Zevran went back to his tent.

Inside the words he’d said still hung there, said and unable to be taken back.  He felt them latch onto him.  Invade his mouth and nose, suffocate him.  Under it, he could smell that woodsy, barley smell of his Warden.  It helped him breathe.

It was then that he knew that it was not just falling.  He was already there.  He had fallen.  Fell.  Zevran picked up Hazel’s discarded clothes and the smell of him wafted in the air.  Gently, he folded them and put them to the side.  He had fallen--he was in love.  He had to fix his lie.  Hazel was not nothing to him.

He was everything.

\--

The night after they first slept together, Hazel asked him to look at the stars.  He stretched out and sniffed the air and said,

“It smells like snow.  I think that’s my favorite smell.”

Zevran could only smell the scent of sex that lingered on them both, still.  Hazel looked up at the clear sky and puffed out air from his lips.

“...Zevran, do you know about the Forgotten Ones?” he asked.

He didn’t.

“Some think they are Elvhen like the Creators but I don’t think so...”

Hazel described twisting arms and gnashing teeth.  Incomprehensible horrors.  His eyes shone as he said it and Zevran was seized with the desire to kiss him.  He looked at him, stretched out on the cold, hard ground as he spoke of his own view of the Forgotten Ones and Zevran thought he was beautiful.

He stretched his arms up into the air and Zevran saw the moonlight play on his inner arms.

“What are those?”

Hazel curled his arms back in and inched away, one hand gripped on his forearm.

“Nothing,” he murmured.

Zevran took his arm and gently held it to the moonlight where he could see the scars properly.

“Mementos from your former lovers?” He raised his brows.  Hazel had not brought a blade into his tent but judging how he had acted in bed, he would not put it past him.

He pulled his arm away and let it fall over his head.

“No.  From myself.”

He felt his brows draw together and he flicked his gaze to his arm.

“Yourself?”

Hazel sat up and stared down at his arm.

“Sometimes...things overwhelm me and I can’t breathe.  So I nick myself.  Enough to bleed.  To be reminded of who I am.  What I am inside.”

Zevran sat up himself and leaned in close to him.  He could feel the heat still radiating from his skin.  On him he could smell his scent as well as his own.

“Overwhelmed?”

His shoulders moved up and down.

“My mind...the Keeper said nothing is truly wrong with me but it feels like there is.  It is hard to explain.” He frowned. “My mind does not...work...like others’ minds.  The Keeper attempted to heal me after...”

His frown deepened.  Zevran slipped his hands downward to stroke his chest.  Easy movements, practiced movements.  Ones he used so often to his advantage.

“After?”

“After I attempted to end my life.”

“You...”

He stared back up at the stars. “I had passed my fourteenth winter and decided that I no longer wished to live.  Tamlen saved me and I could not...return the favor.”

His words weren’t his usual happy, informal chatter.  Zevran detected the quiver and modulation in his voice and knew he was trying to separate himself from his memories.  He gently took Hazel’s chin in his hand and turned his face to his.

“It is alright.”

He kissed him.  Hazel’s usual smile came onto his face.

“Can you smell the snow now?”

\--

Hazel avoided him after the Night of the Lies, as Zevran began privately calling it.  Part of him was grateful.  He didn’t want to parse his own feelings, this burgeoning love.  The feeling of having fallen.  He did not yet want to pull himself up and see where he’d landed.  He didn’t approach Hazel and the Dalish, in turn, did not approach him.  There was too much to do, anyhow.  They were in Denerim, now, planning for this Landsmeet.  He wasn’t avoiding him--he couldn’t, not really--but he didn’t seek him out.  Until one day in the Arl’s estate.

He saw him walking, holding a book out and attempting to read the common tongue.  He heard his panpipe voice struggling over titles and consonants and his heart surged with joy for a brief moment.  It was during that burst of affection for him that he dared to reach out and stop him.  Not touch him.  He would adhere to Hazel’s angered demand that he not touch him.  A simple gesture to alert him to his presence.

Hazel’s eyes snapped up from the book and he paused.  His lips were turned down at the corners and his forehead tensed.  He looked anxious.

“Walk with me,” Zevran said.

He stared at him for a moment before snapping the book closed.

“Alright.” He placed it on an endtable.

Hazel walked with him but he did not speak.  His bare feet kicked up dirt and he frowned at passing people.  He no longer looked around Denerim with wide-eyed interest.

Zevran had a plan but plans never worked well for him.  His plan to kill the Warden failed and his plan to apologize to the Warden failed even worse.  Taliesen never had good timing.  Not as an assassin, a lover, or a friend.  It was just as well that he was dead now, though Zevran’s heart hurt for him momentarily.  He didn’t understand his emotions.  He clumsily tripped over his words in thanking Hazel.  He pulled an earring from his pocket and awkwardly tried to give it to him but Hazel refused it.  Put his hand over his and pushed it away.  The look in those doe eyes was one of anger.  Of hurt.

“I only want things that mean something,” he said.

\--

Hazel sat alone in his room in the Arl’s estate when Zevran found him.  Not entirely alone--his dog was there--but alone enough and that was what mattered.  His hand worked over the blade of his axe and, upon Zevran’s entrance, he saw his fingers clench over the side of the blade.

“I came to apologize.”

His hand unclenched.  He turned it out and Zevran could see a thin cut on the middle joints of his fingers.

“You didn’t send for the Crows, did you?”

He nearly laughed. “Not that.”

Hazel put down his axe and folded his hands together.

“Then what?”

“That night.”

His jaw tensed and he saw his shoulders square.

“What about it?”

Zevran stepped closer to him but still did not dare to touch him.

“You have to understand my...perception of affection.  Of love...it is limited.  Falsified.  By others and later by myself.  Love was a tool, a means to an end.  It was...”

_Nothing until Rinna.  And even that was nothing until you._

“What I mean...” he hastily corrected. “What I said that night was false as well.  You are...everything.  To me.”

Finding words was easy before him.  Hazel stared at him, those doe eyes wide.  The fringe of velvet lashes.  His full mouth open slightly.  Hair as messy as always.

“Ma’arlath,” he said, voice scarcely above a whisper.

“Ma’arlath,” Zevran repeated.  He never learned any Elvish in his brief time running with the Dalish and so his tongue tripped over the word. “I still have the earring if you would like it.”

“Does it mean something?”

“It means everything.”


End file.
